Comments

Jazzie

Mr Harte, keep politics and religion out of newspapers, and deal with news fairly nd Maybe being a Republican AND a Christian were her biggest problems. Any time we called her, e-mailed her, we got nothing.

Jazzie

50s, there's a place for every thing. Just not a local newspaper who is paid for by everyone. They're a very conservative newspaper, only printing what THEY want, not what NEEDS to be printed. So big WHATEVER to you friend.

troglodyte

Mr. McElrath, you seem to be advocating a command economy, like the Soviet Union. There seems to be a lot you don't understand. Point one is that contrary to what your instinct tells you, government is not populated by people like you who have the wisdom and virtue to make better decisions for all of us. And if it was and we gave it the power to do so, tomorrow it would be filled with very different people who had much less virtue and wisdom but no less power.

MrFreeze

Mr McElrath keep living in your dreamland. I am sick and tired of seeing the price of goods go up every time someone feels the minimum wage needs to go up. When wages go up, quality of service starts going down, because then employers will be wanting us to be more productive. Wal Mart for example: they've stopped putting bags of groceries in carts for you, and won't even wait til you've started putting them in before moving onto the next consumer.

Pharyngula

Pastor Short could I challenge you to listen to Reasonable Doubts podcast #111 to hear a more balanced assessment of Joseph Ratzinger? When you learn how a convicted pedophile priest who wanted to be de-frocked was not removed from the church but moved to a new parish where he continued to rape children will your opinion of the pope emeritus change? You will also hear of the Catholic root of Humanism.

Pharyngula

"Should such a one retire?" He has threatened to excommunicate anyone who reports to police incidents of child rape by priests. He has never excommunicated a pedophile priest even though he has reviewed hundreds of their case descriptions. The scandals have led to $2.2 billion in payments to victims in the U.S. alone. He should retire to a cell with bars.

Pharyngula

" The pedophile priest crisis has cost the Roman Catholic church nearly $3 billion in the United States, but only a fraction of the perpetrators have been jailed and little been done to punish those who covered up the crimes. After years of painful revelations, massive payouts, soul searching and reforms, the child sex abuse scandal has spread across the globe and in recent weeks has struck the Church at its very core. Pope Benedict XVI, long celebrated for speaking out against abuse, is facing allegations that he helped protect predator priests when he was archbishop of Munich and later as the Vatican's chief morals enforcer. "We now face the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in church history," the US-based National Catholic Reporter wrote in an editorial demanding "direct answers" from the Holy Father."

Pharyngula

"The independent newspaper decried the "mismanagement" of the crisis and insisted that "the strategies employed so far -- taking the legal path, obscuring the truth, and doing everything possible to protect perpetrators as well as the church's reputation and treasury -- have failed miserably." A CBS News poll released on Friday showed more than two thirds of Americans think the pope has done a bad job in handling the crisis. His favorability rating among US Catholics has fallen to 27 percent from 40 percent in 2006."

formerlyphil

"Many adults in today's society are forced to support a family on these service sector jobs as they are the only jobs readily available to people who do not have a college degree and, obviously, not everyone can obtain a degree."